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\title{The Next 700 Digital Synthesizers}
\author{Stephen Tetley}
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\section{Introduction}
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Various production quality computer languages exist for developing
digital synthesizers - graphical ones such as Max/MSP and its
open-source cousin Pd, and textual ones like the venerable Csound 
along with more recent descendents Supercollider and Faust. 
However despite significant attention by researchers and 
commercial companies, the dominant model for defining digital 
synthesizers remains the block diagram wiring paradigm pioneered 
by Max Mathews when he introduced \emph{Ugens} into the Music-N 
family of synthesis languages.

Whilst the wiring paradigm affords great flexibility it seems 
to impede \emph{modularity} - the above mentioned systems 
generally supply an extensive catalogue of Ugens, but the sole 
granularity of \emph{components} is the Ugen: a user must do all
the wiring themselves, every time they build a synthesizer. There 
are no libraries of pre-built synthesizers that a user can tweak 
to make a satisfying sound.

In contrast, physical digital synthesizers like the Yamaha DX7
supported a fixed set of wiring configurations - famously called 
\emph{algorithms} in the manuals of the Yamaha Corporation. The 
musician-programmer was encouraged to tweak the input-output 
signals of the nodes within these configurations by modulating 
them with user programmed envelopes. Whilst limiting 
programmability, this technology allowed users a very tangible 
relationship with the sound they were producing.

We seek to recover this tangibililty of \emph{sound tweaking} from 
the heritage of physical digital synthsizers in our work on a new 
language for synthesis, along with an advancement in the 
definition of synthesis components that extends component 
granularity from the scale of Ugens to the scale of synthesizers.

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